Not detected. The online scanner did not identify the website which contained material that had been plagiarised.

Basic plagiarism – copied and pasted from an electronic book

Not detected. The online scanner did not identify the electronic book which contained material that had been plagiarised.

General observationsEase of use, overall experience. If other features were included (e.g. spelling, grammar check), how easy were they to use and how useful were they?

Dupeoff.com is an online plagiarism scanner which advertises itself as a "free online plagiarism checker"; however, this is somewhat misleading as users can only check the first four sentences of one submission per day, beyond that a subscription package is required. This in itself is quite confusing. Firstly, there are five different packages, probably four more than there needs to be, and secondly, it's not clear what you're getting for your money. $5 will buy 500 credits, but a 30-50 sentence article will use 30-50 credits so it's possible to wipe out your credits in one go if you're checking a big piece of work.No online support is offered other than a support forum – a questionable way to provide customer service as the world can see what problems individual users of the scanner encounter, and the most recent post exclaims "I have paid for something I can't use!"The scanner itself functions like many plagiarism scanners, relying on content searches run through Google and Bing search engines. The interface itself is pretty basic, although at least searches can be carried out across Google and Bing at the same time, unlike other some other online scanners. Documents cannot be uploaded to the website and content must be pasted directly into its browser to carry out a search. The scanner also features a handy "email results' feature.

During tests, the scanner performed reasonably well, detecting plagiarism in three out of the six sample documents – about average for this type of scanner. It detected plagiarism in work which had been copied directly from the internet, in work where some of the words had been changed and in work which had plagiarised an online pdf. If did not detect plagiarism in an article where some of the words had been removed, nor did it detect an entirely paraphrased article or one which had plagiarised an electronic book.

As there are more effective plagiarism scanners available which are free, purchasing a subscription package isn't recommended.